Mood-congruent Effect Research Articles

Mood congruency affects physiological synchrony but not empathic accuracy in a naturalistic empathy task

Empathy is a crucial aspect of our daily lives, as it enhances our wellbeing and is a proxy for prosocial behavior. It encompasses two related but partially distinct components: cognitive and affective empathy. Both are susceptible to context, biases and an individual’s physiological state. Few studies have explored the effects of a person’s mood on these empathy components, and results are mixed. The current study takes advantage of an ecological, naturalistic empathy task – the empathic accuracy (EA) task – in combination with physiological measurements to examine and differentiate between the effects of one’s mood on both empathy components. Participants were induced with positive or negative mood and presented videos of targets narrating autobiographical negative stories, selected from a Chinese empathy dataset that we developed (now publicly available). The stories were conveyed in audio-only, visual-only and full-video formats. Participants rated the target’s emotional state while watching or listening to their stories, and physiological measures were taken throughout the process. Importantly, similar measures were taken from the targets when they narrated the stories, allowing a comparison between participants’ and targets’ measures. We found that in audio-only and visual-only conditions, participants whose moods were congruent with the target showed higher physiological synchrony than those with incongruent mood, implying a mood-congruency effect on affective empathy. However, there was no mood effect on empathic accuracy (reflecting cognitive empathy), suggesting a different influence of mood on the two empathy components.

Psychological Resilience Factors and Their Association With Weekly Stressor Reactivity During the COVID-19 Outbreak in Europe: Prospective Longitudinal Study.

Cross-sectional relationships between psychosocial resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as the outcome of low mental health reactivity to stressor exposure (low "stressor reactivity" [SR]), were reported during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Extending these findings, we here examined prospective relationships and weekly dynamics between the same RFs and SR in a longitudinal sample during the aftermath of the first wave in several European countries. Over 5 weeks of app-based assessments, participants reported weekly stressor exposure, mental health problems, RFs, and demographic data in 1 of 6 different languages. As (partly) preregistered, hypotheses were tested cross-sectionally at baseline (N=558), and longitudinally (n=200), using mixed effects models and mediation analyses. RFs at baseline, including positive appraisal style (PAS), optimism (OPT), general self-efficacy (GSE), perceived good stress recovery (REC), and perceived social support (PSS), were negatively associated with SR scores, not only cross-sectionally (baseline SR scores; all P<.001) but also prospectively (average SR scores across subsequent weeks; positive appraisal (PA), P=.008; OPT, P<.001; GSE, P=.01; REC, P<.001; and PSS, P=.002). In both associations, PAS mediated the effects of PSS on SR (cross-sectionally: 95% CI -0.064 to -0.013; prospectively: 95% CI -0.074 to -0.0008). In the analyses of weekly RF-SR dynamics, the RFs PA of stressors generally and specifically related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and GSE were negatively associated with SR in a contemporaneous fashion (PA, P<.001; PAC,P=.03; and GSE, P<.001), but not in a lagged fashion (PA, P=.36; PAC, P=.52; and GSE, P=.06). We identified psychological RFs that prospectively predict resilience and cofluctuate with weekly SR within individuals. These prospective results endorse that the previously reported RF-SR associations do not exclusively reflect mood congruency or other temporal bias effects. We further confirm the important role of PA in resilience.

The Effects of Emotions on Trust in Human-Computer Interaction: A Survey and Prospect

With the embodied interaction paradigm, research on human emotions has rapidly increased. In parallel, the advent of artificial intelligence and automated technologies has spurred research on trust towards interactive systems. However, little research has directly investigated the effects of emotions on trust in the context of technology use. The present paper surveyed empirical studies using the PRISMA framework. After briefly introducing emotional effects on cognitive processes, twenty-nine studies were systematically analyzed. In many papers positive emotions or empathically congruent systems led to higher trust. Some studies indicated that emotions can be a mediator between different factors and trust, whereas other studies showed only partial effects depending on different users or situations. Note that some research showed null effects or even negative effects (backfire effects) because emotional systems can be perceived as sarcastic or uncanny. In addition to the pervasive mood congruent effect or emotional contagion, various psychological mechanisms and theories were identified, such as entitativity, cognitive appraisal, or affect infusion model. Considerations for future design and research are discussed with results. This survey paper is expected to deepen the theoretical aspects of emotional effects on trust towards diverse technologies (robots, agents, or other interactive systems) and provide practical design directions.

Musical emotions affect memory for emotional pictures

Music is widely known for its ability to evoke emotions. However, assessing specific music-evoked emotions other than through verbal self-reports has proven difficult. In the present study, we explored whether mood-congruency effects could be used as indirect measures of specific music-evoked emotions. First, participants listened to 15 music excerpts chosen to induce different emotions; after each excerpt, they were required to look at four different pictures. The pictures could either: (1) convey an emotion congruent with that conveyed by the music (i.e., congruent pictures); (2) convey a different emotion than that of the music, or convey no emotion (i.e., incongruent pictures). Second, participants completed a recognition task that included new pictures as well as already seen congruent and incongruent pictures. From previous findings about mood-congruency effects, we hypothesized that if music evokes a given emotion, this would facilitate memorization of pictures that convey the same emotion. Results revealed that accuracy in the recognition task was indeed higher for emotionally congruent pictures than for emotionally incongruent ones. The results suggest that music-evoked emotions have an influence on subsequent cognitive processing of emotional stimuli, suggesting a role of mood-congruency based recall tasks as non-verbal methods for the identification of specific music-evoked emotions.

New Perspectives In The Objective Evaluation Of Animal Welfare, With Focus On The Domestic Pig

ABSTRACT Animal welfare can be viewed as the result of integrating repeated affective evaluations of success in coping with environmental challenges, i.e., subjective challenge adequacy. The present work summarizes why established physiological and behavioral welfare parameters are inadequate to assess challenge adequacy. Behavioral tests based on the mood-congruent judgment effect and physiologic parameters based on components of the somatotropic axis are proposed as an alternative. Here, the judgment bias measures an animal’s subjective confidence to cope successfully with a challenge, which is in turn modulated by the animal’s previous experience. The somatotropic axis incorporates the insulin-like growth factor (IGF) and its binding proteins (IGFBP), which are involved in the regulation of metabolism and growth. First results indicate that in particular IGF-1 and IGFBP-3 react with higher latency and higher inertness to short-term stressful events than established physiological stress parameters. Before these indicators can be utilized for overall welfare assessment, further validation studies are necessary that provide more insights into how repeatable the measurements are under different conditions and which other factors may confound the measures.

The effect of an induced negative mood on the updating of affective information.

Updating is an important executive function that is vital for the attainment of goals such as cognitive tasks, daily activities, and the regulation of emotion. The ability to update affective content in working memory is said to be influenced by mood. However, little is known regarding the influences of mood on the valence of affective content. We hypothesized that first, a negative mood would impair the updating of affective information. Second, this impeding impact would be weaker for the updating of negative information due to the mood congruence effect. Sixty-three Russian-speaking participants were recruited for the experiment. Half of the participants were induced into a negative mood by negative pictures; the other half were presented with neutral pictures. All participants performed the affective 2-back task before and after mood induction. The results showed that negative mood impaired the accuracy rates of updating. However, the mood congruence effect was not observed in the updating of positive and negative materials. We recommend that more experiments be conducted with varied affective stimuli.

The Effects of Power, Weather, and Mood on Customers’ Impulsive Buying Behavior

In this study, the consumer types were divided into two groups: power and powerless. First, depending on the sense of power, the interaction effect between power and powerless was verified based on two types of weather: sunny and cloudy. Secondly, the purchase intention of luxury goods was examined as a dependent variable and the difference in purchase behavior patterns were observed. Lastly, based on the mood-congruent effect of consumer purchase intentions, it was confirmed that power influences weather, and the weather and mood are influenced by each other, as also manifested in empirical studies. In particular, the power group had a more significant effect than the powerless group, and the positive mood and weather played a big role for consumers’ intention to purchase luxury goods. Therefore, this study can contribute both theoretically and practically to prepare appropriate marketing strategy plans based on weather and consumer roles—power and powerless.

Mood Induction Differently Affects Early Neural Correlates of Evaluative Word Processing in L1 and L2.

We investigate how mood inductions impact the neural processing of emotional adjectives in one’s first language (L1) and a formally acquired second language (L2). Twenty-three student participants took part in an EEG experiment with two separate sessions. Happy or sad mood inductions were followed by series of individually presented positive, negative, or neutral adjectives in L1 (German) or L2 (English) and evaluative decisions had to be performed. Visual event-related potentials elicited during word processing were analyzed during N1 (125–200 ms), Early Posterior Negativities (EPN, 200–300 ms and 300–400 ms), N400 (350–450 ms), and the Late Positive Potential (LPP, 500–700 ms). Mood induction differentially impacted word processing already on the N1, with stronger left lateralization following happy than sad mood induction in L1, but not in L2. Moreover, regardless of language, early valence modulation was found following happy but not sad mood induction. Over occipital areas, happy mood elicited larger amplitudes of the mood-congruent positive words, whereas over temporal areas mood-incongruent negative words had higher amplitudes. In the EPN-windows, effects of mood and valence largely persisted, albeit with no difference between L1 and L2. N400 amplitude was larger for L2 than for L1. On the LPP, mood-incongruent adjectives elicited larger amplitudes than mood-congruent ones. Results reveal a remarkably early valence-general effect of mood induction on cortical processing, in line with previous reports of N1 as a first marker of contextual integration. Interestingly, this effect differed between L1 and L2. Moreover, mood-congruent effects were found in perceptual processing and mood-incongruent ERP amplification in higher-order evaluative stages.

Mood-congruent biases in facial emotion perception and their gender dependence.

Due to mood-congruency effects, we expect the emotion perceived on a face to be biased towards one's own mood. But the findings in the scant literature on such mood effects in normal healthy populations have not consistently and adequately supported this expectation. Employing effective mood manipulation techniques that ensured that the intended mood was sustained throughout the perception task, we explored mood-congruent intensity and recognition accuracy biases in emotion perception. Using realistic face stimuli with expressive cues of happiness and sadness, we demonstrated that happy, neutral and ambiguous expressions were perceived more positively in the positive than in the negative mood. The mood-congruency effect decreased with the degree of perceived negativity in the expression. Also, males were more affected by the mood-congruency effect in intensity perception than females. We suggest that the greater salience and better processing of negative stimuli and the superior cognitive ability of females in emotion perception are responsible for these observations. We found no evidence for mood-congruency effect in the recognition accuracy of emotions and suggest with supporting evidence that past reports of this effect may be attributed to response bias driven by mood.

Negative Mood Impairs Updating of Affective Information

Updating is an important executive function that is vital for the attainment of goals such as cognitive tasks, daily activities and the regulation of emotion. The ability to update affective content in working memory is said to be influenced by mood. However, little is known regarding influences of mood on the valence of the affective content. We hypothesized that first, negative mood would impair updating of affective information. Second, this impeding impact would be weaker for the updating of negative information due to mood congruence effect. Sixty-three Russian speaking participants were recruited for the experiment. Half of the participants were induced into negative mood by negative pictures; the other half were presented with neutral pictures. All participants performed the affective 2-back task before and after mood induction. The results showed that negative mood impaired the accuracy rates of updating. However, the mood congruence effect was not observed in the updating of positive and negative materials. We recommend that more experiments be conducted with varied affective stimuli and across different populations.

Virtual Reality Experiments on Emotional Face Recognition Find No Evidence of Mood-Congruent Effects.

Mood-congruent effects have been demonstrated many times, but few studies have managed to replicate the effect with natural moods. Additionally, the ecological validity of mood induction and real-time observation deficiency remain unresolved. Using a newly developed, virtual-reality-based eye-tracking technique, the present study conducted real-time observations of mood effects on emotional face recognition with simulated “real-life” pleasant and grisly scenes. In experiment 1, participants performed an emotional face recognition task in both positive and negative virtual reality scenes. The recognition tests and gaze tracking results failed to support mood-congruent effects but did show a mood effect independent of a strong emotional face effect. In experiment 2, participants performed a neutral face recognition task in pleasant and grisly scenes that were matched for arousal levels, and the mood effect disappeared. The results also revealed a robust negativity bias in emotional face recognition, which was found to accompany a mood repair effect.

Mood congruency effects are mediated by shifts in salience and central executive network efficiency.

Emotions are not confined to short momentary states but carry on over time, facilitating the perception and interpretation of the environment in mood-congruent ways. Yet, the (neural) mechanism linking affective stimulation at a certain time-point to such altered, mood-congruent processing of stimuli presented at a subsequent time-point remains unknown. Recent research suggests that such a link could be explained by transient effects of affective stimulation on the organization of intrinsic macro-scale neural networks. It remains, however, unclear whether these changes in network organization are influencing subsequent perception in a mood-congruent way. Addressing this gap the current study investigated whether changes in network organization, measured in terms of network efficiency, mediate the relation between mood induction and mood-congruent processing as measured by reaction times during an emotional Stroop task. The results demonstrated that negative mood induction increased the efficiency of the salience network and decreased the efficiency of the central executive network. This modulation of network efficiency fully mediated the effects of mood induction on reaction times to negative words. These findings indicate that transient shifts in the organization of macro-scale neural networks are an essential part of the emotional response and can help to explain how affect shapes our interaction with the environment.

The influence of mood and information processing strategies on recall, persuasion, and intention to get a flu vaccine

This study investigates the interactions between mood (positive/negative) and information processing style (item-specific/relational/narrative processing) on responses to three types of advertising messages (ungrouped list/grouped list/narrative ads). A mood congruency effect was postulated and found to influence recall, persuasion and behavioral intention. Results supported the hypothesis that message effectiveness was moderated by mood in the direction of congruency. That is, participants in a positive mood recalled more information, were more persuaded, and were more likely to adopt the recommended behavior after exposure to advertisements with a grouped list format. Evidence regarding similarity of factors influencing relational and narrative processing is presented.

Mood-affect congruency. Exploring the relation between learners’ mood and the affective charge of educational videos

In the educational context, the influences of the emotional charge of audiovisual media are rarely investigated. Additionally, the mood of the learner influences learning with multimedia. This study aims to investigate the influence of both variables on learning with videos. Therefore, 162 school students watched educational videos which were manipulated in terms of emotional charge. The participants were randomly assigned to one cell of a 2 (learners mood: positive vs. negative) × 2 (emotional charge of the educational video: positive vs. negative) between-subjects factorial design. Retention and transfer performance were measured in order to examine learning effects. Furthermore, mental load, mental effort, and affective variables were collected. Results revealed that the mood of the learner did not influence learning outcomes and cognitive assessments. The positive emotional charge of the video fostered retention performance and led to a reduced mental load. Transfer performance was fostered in the conditions with congruence between learners mood and the emotional charge of the video. Results are discussed by considering the emotion-as-facilitator hypothesis and the mood congruency effect.

Proposal of Episodic Memory Retrieval Method on Mood Congruence Effects

Developments in robotics have advanced the development of robots that can communicate with humans. However, a few robots are only capable of stereotypic responses, and this leads to barriers in smooth communication between humans and robots. In this study, in order to represent mood congruence effects, an episodic memory retrieval method is proposed based on a robot’s emotional values that represent its internal state. In the study, impression evaluation experiments were conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Decision mechanisms underlying mood-congruent emotional classification

ABSTRACT There is great interest in understanding whether and how mood influences affective processing. Results in the literature have been mixed: some studies show mood-congruent processing but others do not. One limitation of previous work is that decision components for affective processing and responses biases are not dissociated. The present study explored the roles of affective processing and response biases using a drift-diffusion model (DDM) of simple choice. In two experiments, participants decided if words were emotionally positive or negative while listening to music that induced positive or negative mood. The behavioural results showed weak, inconsistent mood-congruency effects. In contrast, the DDM showed consistent effects that were selectively driven by an a-priori bias in response expectation, suggesting that music-induced mood influences expectations about the emotionality of upcoming stimuli, but not the emotionality of the stimuli themselves. Implications for future studies of emotional classification and mood are subsequently discussed.

Negative Bias in the Perception and Memory of Emotional Information in Alzheimer Disease.

There is some controversy about the ability of patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) to experience and remember emotional stimuli. This study aims to assess the emotional experience of patients with AD and the existence of emotional enhancement of memory. We also investigated the influence of affective state on these processes. Sixty pictures from the International Affective Picture System were administered to 106 participants (72 patients with AD and 54 controls). Participants performed immediate free recall and recognition tasks. Positive and Negative Affect Schedule was used to assess the participants' current affect. Patients identified the valence of unpleasant pictures better than of others pictures and experienced them as more arousing. Patients and controls recalled and recognized higher number of emotional pictures than of neutral ones. Patients discriminated better the unpleasant pictures. A mood congruent effect was observed on emotional experience but not on memory. Positive affect was associated with better immediate recall and with a more liberal response bias. Patients with AD can identify the emotional content of the stimuli, especially of the unpleasant ones, and the emotional enhancement of memory is preserved. Affective state does not explain the differences in the processing and memory of emotional items between patients and controls.

Mood congruent tuning of reward expectation in positive mood: evidence from FRN and theta modulations.

Positive mood broadens attention and builds additional mental resources. However, its effect on performance monitoring and reward prediction errors remain unclear. To examine this issue, we used a standard mood induction procedure (based on guided imagery) and asked 45 participants to complete a gambling task suited to study reward prediction errors by means of the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and mid-frontal theta band power. Results showed a larger FRN for negative feedback as well as a lack of reward expectation modulation for positive feedback at the theta level with positive mood, relative to a neutral mood condition. A control analysis showed that this latter result could not be explained by the mere superposition of the event-related brain potential component on the theta oscillations. Moreover, these neurophysiological effects were evidenced in the absence of impairments at the behavioral level or increase in autonomic arousal with positive mood, suggesting that this mood state reliably altered brain mechanisms of reward prediction errors during performance monitoring. We interpret these new results as reflecting a genuine mood congruency effect, whereby reward is anticipated as the default outcome with positive mood and therefore processed as unsurprising (even when it is unlikely), while negative feedback is perceived as unexpected.

The effect of mood on false memory for emotional DRM word lists

ABSTRACTIn the present study, we investigated the effect of participants’ mood on true and false memories of emotional word lists in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In Experiment 1, we constructed DRM word lists in which all the studied words and corresponding critical lures reflected a specified emotional valence. In Experiment 2, we used these lists to assess mood-congruent true and false memory. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three induced-mood conditions (positive, negative, or neutral) and were presented with word lists comprised of positive, negative, or neutral words. For both true and false memory, there was a mood-congruent effect in the negative mood condition; this effect was due to a decrease in true and false recognition of the positive and neutral words. These findings are consistent with both spreading-activation and fuzzy-trace theories of DRM performance and have practical implications for our understanding of the effect of mood on memory.

Emotional Experience and the Mood-Congruent Working Memory Effect in First-Onset and Untreated Depressive Disorder Patients

Using an improved Sternberg working memory paradigm and affective pictures of different valences, this study investigates the emotional experience capability of 22 first-onset and untreated major depressive disorder patients (MDD) compared with the matching 22 healthy control participants (HC) and whether there is a moodcongruent working memory effect. We employed a general linear model analysis of variance (ANOVA) with two-factor repeated measures analysis on the emotional experience capability (pupil diameter changes) and the working memory performance (accuracy). The results show that the pupil diameter changes of positive emotions are significantly greater in MDD than those in HC (p<0.001), and the pupil diameter changes of negative emotions are not significantly different between two groups (p=0.055), which suggest that MDD have a significantly decrease in the ability to experience pleasure (anhedonia). In addition, the results only present that the working memory performances of negative emotions are significantly greater in MDD than those of positive emotions (p<0.05), which indicates that there is a mood-congruent memory effect. Moreover, in MDD, a positive correlation is found between the pupil diameter changes and working memory performances of positive emotions, however there is no correlation between those of negative emotions. Taken together, these results suggest that MDD have a moodcongruent memory effect and anhedonia, and the mood-congruent memory effect may be due to the decreased memory performances of positive emotions (a decrease in the ability to experience pleasure), but not those of negative emotions increased. This study not only illustrates that the core symptoms of depressive patients may be a mood-congruent memory effect and anhedonia but also enriches the connotation of anhedonia as an endophenotype indicator.